World Wide Words -- 27 Nov 99
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Nov 27 08:10:02 UTC 1999
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 168 Saturday 27 November 1999
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 6,500 subscribers in at least 94 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/> E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
--------
1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Zoochosis.
3. Weird Words: Poppycock.
4. Q & A: Sowing one's wild oats, Teaching one's grandmother
to suck eggs, Sycophant.
5. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.
1. Notes and feedback
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HUNKY-DORY Subscriber Robert Burns wrote to point out gently that
if I had consulted the authoritative _Random House Historical
Dictionary of American Slang_, I would have found a more likely
(and more interesting) origin for the word. The suggestion is that
the term was introduced in America about 1865 by a popular variety
performer named Japanese Tommy. Mr Burns reports that it is said to
have been sailors' slang for a street in Yokohama named Honki-Dori,
whose inhabitants "catered for the pleasures of sailors", as he
puts it. The word was a play on the existing word 'hunky' for
something that was fine, splendid or satisfactory, which itself
probably derives from the adjective 'hunk' with much the same
sense. That can be traced back to the 1840s and has links to
another reduplicated term, 'hunkum-bunkum'.
CHOPPED LIVER Thanks to many subscribers, I am now well informed
about this expression for a thing that is insignificant or trivial,
originally from the New York Jewish community. The _Random House
Historical Dictionary of American Slang_ (whoops) cites it first
from the _Jimmy Durante Show_ in 1954, though it must surely be
older. William Safire, in one of his pieces in _The New York
Times_, quoted Sol Steinmetz: "Chopped liver is merely an appetizer
or side dish, not as important as chicken soup or gefilte fish.
Hence it was used among Jewish comedians in the Borsht Belt as a
humorous metaphor for something or someone insignificant".
FAILED MAIL Apologies again for all the trouble over distributing
last week's issue. It seems the problem was due to a mail server
which became swamped by the number of messages and ended up taking
three days or more to disgorge e-mails, in the process losing some
and sending other people multiple copies. Better luck this week, I
hope ...
2. Turns of Phrase: Zoochosis
------------------------------------------------------------------
You're likely to find this word used by animal rights activists in
reference to what they see as the degrading effect of zoos on the
animals they contain. Many animals, especially the large
carnivores, become deeply depressed, even psychotic, as the result
of captivity. Symptoms of 'zoochosis' include nervous pacing, head
rocking, and self-mutilation. The problem is perhaps most acute
with polar bears, which have proved especially difficult to keep
sane, and which often show disturbed behaviour such as swimming for
hours in small circles. (The Central Park Zoo in New York had to
call in an animal psychologist to find ways to give its polar bear,
Gus, a more varied and challenging environment.) The word, a blend
of 'zoo' and 'psychosis', seems to date from the early 1990s, but
is still fairly specialist and hasn't - so far as I know - yet made
it to any dictionary.
In the zoological gardens outside Ho Chi Minh City, dazed elephants
swing their trunks from side to side, their feet tethered by chains
and their repetitive motions betraying signs of a dementia known as
'zoochosis'.
[_Time International_, Oct. 1998]
Also known as 'zoochosis', the problem is characterised by swaying
the head and pacing up and down in their enclosure incessantly in a
trance-like state, indicating they may be suffering from boredom.
[_Independent on Sunday_, Nov. 1999]
3. Weird Words: Poppycock
------------------------------------------------------------------
Nonsense, rubbish.
It's a fine-sounding expletive, but hardly heard on anybody's lips
these days, and with a dated feel. It seems eminently English:
think of elderly ex-Indian-Army colonels in retirement in Tunbridge
Wells exploding in wrath over some supposed mismanagement of the
country's affairs and writing disgusted letters to _The Times_
about it. And most of the citations for it in the big _Oxford
English Dictionary_ are from British sources. But, as the _OED_
reminds us, the word is actually American in origin, first turning
up there about 1865. The _OED_ is silent on its origin, but most
recent dictionaries know where it comes from: the Dutch word
'pappekak' for soft faeces. The word was presumably taken to the
USA by Dutch settlers; the scatological associations were lost when
the word moved into the English-language community. The first half
of the word is closely related to our 'pap' for infants' soft food;
the second half is essentially the same as the English 'cack' for
excrement; the verb form of this word is older than the noun, and
has been recorded as far back as the fifteenth century. So there's
no link with the vulgar meaning of 'cock'. Nor is it linked to the
sense of 'cock' for rubbish (as in phrases like 'that's a load of
old cock'), as that's a shortened form of 'cock and bull story',
which comes from a fable concerning a bull and a cockerel.
4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited. If I can do so,
a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]
-----------
Q. Can you tell me the derivation of 'sowing one's wild oats'? Why
oats? [Len Jayson]
A. Not so much why 'oats', as why 'wild oats'. The saying is
referring to a European grass species with the formal name 'Avena
fatua', which has for centuries in English been called 'wild oats'.
Some botanists think it's the wild original of cultivated oats.
Farmers have since ancient times hated it because it's a weed
that's useless as a cereal crop, but its seeds have always been
difficult to separate from those of useful cereals and so tended to
survive and multiply from year to year. The only way to remove it
was to tramp the fields and hand-weed it. Even today it's still a
problem, despite modern seed cleaning and weedkillers.
So sowing wild oats was the archetypal useless occupation, indeed
worse than useless. It's not surprising that the phrase 'sowing
wild oats' was applied figuratively to young men who frittered away
their time in stupid or idle pastimes. But there's a strong sexual
association here, too, because the phrase was often applied, in a
more or less indulgent way, and always to young men, to what was
politely referred to as youthful dissipation. The associations
between male sexual activity and sowing seed are obvious enough.
The saying is first recorded in English in 1542, in a tract by the
Norfolk Protestant clergyman Thomas Becon, though I'm told that a
related phrase appears in the works of the Roman author Plautus.
It's common in English literature, no doubt because the image
struck a chord in a society that was still mainly agrarian. Here's
a typical example, from _Little Women_ by Louisa May Alcott, of
1869: "Boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and
women must not expect miracles".
-----------
Q. I wonder if you would care to explain a phrase in wide use but
rather odd in its direct meaning: 'teaching your grandmother to
suck eggs'? (This has been in use by my parents, both in their
70s). [Jonathan Downes]
A. It does look odd, but its meaning is clear enough: don't give
needless assistance or presume to offer advice to an expert. As
that prolific author, Anon, once wrote:
Teach not thy parent's mother to extract
The embryo juices of the bird by suction.
The good old lady can that feat enact,
Quite irrespective of your kind instruction.
Many similar expressions have been invented down the years, such as
'Don't teach your grandmother how to milk ducks', and 'don't teach
your grandmother to steal sheep'. These have the same kind of
absurd image as the version you quote, which has survived them all.
It was first recorded in 1707 in a translation by John Stevens of
the collected comedies of the Spanish playwright Quevedo: "You
would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs". Another early
example, whimsically inverted, is in 'Tom Jones' by Henry Fielding,
published in 1749: "I remember my old schoolmaster, who was a
prodigious great scholar, used often to say, Polly matete cry town
is my daskalon. The English of which, he told us, was, That a child
may sometimes teach his grandmother to suck eggs".
But the idea is very much older. There was a classical proverb 'A
swine to teach Minerva', which was translated by Nichola Udall in
1542 as 'to teach our dame to spin', something any married woman of
the period would know very well how to do. And there are other
examples of sayings designed to check the tendency of young people
to give unwanted advice to their elders and betters.
-----------
Q. What is the origin of 'sycophant'? The only meaning I have is
someone who shows a fig". [William Garneau]
A. That's the English translation of the original classical Greek
word 'sukophantes', which comes from 'sukon', a fig, and
'phainein', to show. The Greek word meant an informer, or a false
accuser, but the association with figs is less than obvious.
One theory has it that it relates to a period when the exportation
of figs from ancient Athens was prohibited by law, something we
know about from the writings of Plutarch. So the word could refer
to somebody who informed on those who broke the law in this way.
But there's no evidence and modern scholars dismiss it.
A better explanation is that 'giving someone the fig' is an ancient
expression for the obscene gesture of putting the thumb between two
fingers. (The word for 'fig' in Greek, Italian, English and other
languages has long been a low slang term for the female genitals,
from a supposed resemblance.) It could be that the Greek word
referred to the action of an informer figuratively (so to speak)
giving the fig to the criminals he informed against.
When 'sycophant' first appeared in English in the sixteenth century
it had this original meaning of an informer, but quickly moved
through a sense of a person who bears tales to a person of higher
status to its modern sense. This the big _Oxford English
Dictionary_ explains in one of its better definitions as "A mean,
servile, cringing, or abject flatterer; a parasite, toady,
lickspittle".
5. Administration
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to
the list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
The subject line of your e-mail message will be ignored.
* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. You
may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
media provided that you give the source and Web site address of
<http://www.quinion.com/words/>.
===================================================================
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list